At any one time, how many stories are you working on?
I work on one thing at a time. Other people like multiple jobs, but for me I concentrate very heavily and I get crazy when I’m taken off it.
What novel have you personally enjoyed the most writing?
Once I apparently answered this question, ‘Northworld.’ I can’t imagine why I did that, because I was so stressed while writing Northworld that I was having back spasms that made it difficult for me to walk some days. I’m very proud of the book and the series, but they’re enormously complex works–note the way words are echoed within and among the interwoven plot strands, for example–and the first one darned near crippled me.
Now I’d say Lord of the Isles. I’ve always loved fantasy, but because I’d been successful with military SF I wasn’t able to do as much as I’d have liked to. Getting the chance to write Lord of the Isles was a wonderful change of pace. You can take the series as homage to Tolkien and to Robert E Howard both if you like; I do.
Which genre do you feel is your best to write in?
Best is tricky. I don’t know really. I can do some things in the military that others who’ve had different lives can’t, but I personally think some of the Old Nathan stories are as close to a unique thing as I’ve done.
Who were your influences?
One strand is pulp fiction–literally, stories from the ’30s and ’40s collected into anthologies in the ’50s when I started reading SF and fantasy. Robert E. Howard in particular, then when I got to college the Tolkien trilogy in the SUI Library before the books came out in paperback.
The other strand is Latin authors and the classics more generally (though the Greek mostly in translation). I’ve got a separate section on this site on the classics, but the short version is that Tacitus and Caesar in their different ways are models for prose in any language, and the ability of some of the poets (Ovid and Juvenal spring first to mind) to handle tricky problems like continuous action and capsule description can teach any writer. They certainly taught me.
What’s your best book?
Again, that’s a matter of definition. Personally I’d say Redliners, but that’s not a book for everybody. It’s a very tough story about war and redemption. With the Lightnings–a space opera–and the Isles Series, my Tolkienesque fantasies, have characters that more people are going to find attractive. I think maybe writing Redliners did something positive for me. At any rate, it probably isn’t chance that the books I’ve written after that one are–I won’t say softer, exactly, but peopled with characters who haven’t done so many things that they can’t forgive themselves for.
Who do you read for pleasure?
In the field–I read a lot of stuff out of the f/sf field–I read Vance and Pratchett among living authors, and have a particular affection for Kuttner, Kornbluth, and Jack Williamson’s work from the ’30s and ’40s. Hmm; and I regularly reread R.E.Howard and C.A.Smith; I should mention them.
Did you take the plot of THE SHARP END from Kurosawa’s Yojimbo or from Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars?
No, I took the plot from Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett, his first novel (a fixup from novellas he’d written for Black Mask magazine in the late 1920s). Kurosawa took Hammett’s plot for his fine Samurai film (I’m told there may have been a Japanese gangster novel as an intermediary, but I haven’t seen it myself), and Leone then turned Kurosawa’s film into the first of his Spaghetti Westerns. I’m familar with (and like) both films, but I read Hammett before I saw them and have reread him often since then. I’m a little surprised to be asked this question so often, because my credit to Hammett in the front of the novel is explicit. Apparently a lot of people expect more originality of the film industry than I do.
Why is the hardcover edition of Servant of the Dragon so poorly proofread?
This is a sore subject with me. I did three drafts of the novel (as usual). My friend Dan Breen read each section after I’d gone over it the first time, and my wife read the final typescript. By the time I sent electronic copy to my Tor editor (whom I won’t name here) it was very clean. continue reading…
It surprises me to be asked this so frequently since I thought I’d covered it in the introductory notes to each volume. Classical peoples were heavily involved in magic (as opposed to religion). This seems to have been mostly Egyptian in origin, though there are mixtures of classical religion as well as Judaism and Christianity.
Spells could be for any purpose: revenge on a thief or strayed lover, gambling success, and good health are among the range of typical examples. The person making the spell spoke it or wrote and buried it. A lot of those buried (often in a graveyard) have been discovered in modern times. continue reading…